generic way to access C++ libs?

[Alex Martelli]

Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
   ...
> > Anyway, if my guess is correct that the demand for such a 'c++types'
> > is really burning only on Windows,
> 
> What's behind this guess ?

The fact that Windows is the only widespread OS where getting a compiler
isn't as easy as installing it, for free, off the OS media.  Admittedly
many Mac users don't even bother to install the compilers and IDEs that
Apple packs on the MacOSX media, but then these are people not at all
interested in developing programs -- they wouldn't program using the
hypothetical c++types either.


> > I think Boost Python, if all needed tools were present, might be
> > able to do a more automatic job of producing the wrapper,
> 
> Hmmm. Boost does refuse to make any assumptions, and therefore
> requires human intervention in quite a few cases. Maybe default
> assumptions could be built into Pyste. Maybe they already have; it's a
> while since I looked at Pyste.

Yeah, pyste is what I had in mind, I had just forgotten the name (it had
been quite a while for me, too).

> And I also suspect that, in practice, there will be a fairly low limit
> on the size of library that Boost can wrap, because of compile-time
> memory consumption. ISTRT wrapping about 20-30 methods taken from
> about 5 classes used up half a Gb of RAM. So you probably don't want
> the throw Boost at a whole library indiscriminantly.

Wow -- THAT bad?!  Eeek.

> Having said that, I recall that was some utility being developed to
> split the compilation into small submodules, as an attempt to manage
> the memory explosion.

Makes sense, I guess.


Alex